Motor vehicles could seem 'PISSED' in the future !

[Ian (GPX)]

Bid to introduce 'alcohol' fuel
An environmentally-friendly fuel similar to pure alcohol could be introduced in Somerset.
Bioethanol is made from grains and sugar cane, instead of fossil fuels, and offsets about 70% of fossil carbon emissions.

The Somerset Biofuel Project, together with partners in five other countries, has applied for European funding to develop its use as a transport fuel.

The project includes Wessex Water, Somerset County Council and Ford.

It follows an initiative in Sweden where the Ford Focus "Flexible Fuelled Vehicle" has been introduced.

The result of the bid is expected in August 2005 and, if successful, bioethanol would be available in Somerset from March 2006.

[mrchips]

To be honest you'd be cheaper with a litre of unleaded than a litre of white label.
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[G]

Don't have the time to look for the details, but think they've been using alcohol powered cars in Brazil for ages.

I'm sure someone will pop along with slightly more detailed facts .

[Yamaha_AzA]

i heard they are using alcohol powerd cars in Brazil too ste, I would prefer unleaded to alcohol because two stroke smoke smells so nice, plus i'd probabely end up drinking the alcohol fuel and have a bad headache in the morning.
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[cagiva gezzer]

The main issues with alcohol fuel or bio diesel is that they need a huge area of land to make the fuel. Not 100% sure if this is correct, but i beleive that even if all of the avaliable agricultural land in the UK was used for bio diesel, it would only meet 10% of the Uk's diesel needs.
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[JonB]

Had to happen in somerset!

As long as they don't take away our cider i'm fine.
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[stinkwheel]

They used quite a lot of alcohol to run vehicles during the war. It is still used by a lot of the classic scrambles and trials riders who call it 'dope' which is to all intents and purposes, wood alcohol.

It works very well as a fuel as it has a very high octane rating enabling stupidly high compression ratios but needs a HUGE main-jet and the stuff runs through the engine like a drunk pissing. My mate has just bought a Tri-BSA scrambler which is set up to run on dope, it has no main jet at all in the carbs, just the hole you screw it into.

I have another aquaintance who was runing his MZ 2-stroke on a mix of unleaded and meths, again with much larger jetting (he has an SU carb on it and can adjust the jetting on the fly using a lever on the bars). The mixture has the problem in that it makes water from the fuel settle out in the bottom of the tank which needs draining out occasionally.
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[mchaggis]

The Brazilians and Cubans in particular are known to run a mixture of (m)ethanol and petrol, partly because it's cheaper than pure petrol as it's made from sugar cane, and also because of the US trade embargoes in the second case.

There's no reason why it won't work, and indeed is used in plenty of racing classes in the US. We've got plenty of capacity for sugar beet in this country, it's just people's reluctance to change and reluctance to improve the neccesary infrastructure that's slowing the whole thing down.

Incidentally, alcohol fueled IC engines have been around and developed since at least the 1950's if not before. No major manufacturers have done anything much with them since though.

IC= internal combustion. (external combustion engines are those like steam engines where the working gas is seperate from the burning fuel.)
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[MarJay]

The other difficulty being that methanol is very toxic, and can cause blindness! It burns cleanly and puts out a lot of energy per volume which means that you could store enough in a car to make normal fuel ranges possible, However I get the feeling its nowhere near as efficient as petrol for IC engines.
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[Kickstart]

Hi

From memory we have easily enough land to supply us with our fuel needs from bio fuels (after all, plenty of crops are just grown for subsidies rather than actually used).

Ethanol and methanol both work well but have a far lower energy content by voume. Not really a problem if you can put up with a 50% larger fuel tank.

Methanol makes you blind quite rapidly.

The other problem with one of them (cannot remember which) is that they burn with a clear flame which is a touch dangerous.

All the best

Keith
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